Remember the days when your idiot friends would argue with you in the schoolyard about how "blast processing" made the Sega Genesis a better system than the Super Nintendo? Or how the Nintendo 64 was twice as good as the Sony PlayStation because it had twice as many "bits"? Or how the Wii's processor was no better than "two GameCubes stuck together"? Here in our new, enlightened age, I thought we had left such context-free numbers games behind like so many other childish arguments.

But no, in 2012 people are apparently still obsessing over how a single spec number makes one console wholly better or worse than another. Today's bit of myopic number-crunching is based on the findings of Wii hacker (and now purported Wii U hacker) Hector Martin, who last night tweeted claims that he had discovered the previously unknown clock speeds for the Wii U's tri-core PowerPC 750 processor (about 1.24GHz) and the AMD Radeon-based GPU (about 550MHz).

The Wii U's CPU clock speed number is indeed lower than the Xbox 360's 3.2GHz clock (although the 360's gets halved to a functional 1.6GHz when multithreading) or the PS3's 4GHz clock. The GPU clock speeds are more comparable across the PS3, the Xbox 360, and the Wii U. Still, plenty of reporters jumped on that fact as undeniable evidence that the Wii U hardware is actually inferior to that of consoles that came out years ago.